UCLG Position Paper v_2 (eng)
22/12/09
18:13
Página 22
Support Paper on Aid Effectiveness and Local Government
• began pooling un-earmarked resources in support of Tanzania’s Health Sector Strategic Plan (FY04-FY09) and its MKUKUTA (Poverty Reduction Strategy). Creating a common fund (known as the Health Basket Fund) for the health system represented an effort to harmonize development cooperation in the sector and remove distortions in sector allocation priorities, which would commonly occur before the reforms, when there were multiple distinct health interventions.
ensure that decentralized cooperation approaches (MIC/ACB) are developed within the framework of southern-driven agendas that take into account the local cultural context, country processes and governance reform programs, concretized in country strategies for municipal sector development. Example: With support from northern counterparts, many southern LGAs are developing national strategies for municipal sector strengthening through broad stakeholder processes. Aligned with the country’s Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSP) and other national development strategies, these country strategies help focus (MIC) between southern and northern LG players and are a legitimate expression of “local ownership” and alignment.
A central feature of Tanzania’s Health Basked Fund is that it places greater responsibility for, and control of, health services planning and delivery in the hands of regional and local governments, while ensuring that this planning is aligned with the Health Sector Strategic Plan and the Government of Tanzania’s poverty reduction strategy. The Fund has enabled resources to be redistributed in individual districts, providing additional funds per person. According to the Joint External Evaluation of the Health Sector in 2007, “The Health Basket Fund has played a particularly important role in supporting the meaningful implementation of decentralization of responsibility for health services to Local Government Authorities”.
4.3 Harmonization – Local governments should take the lead in harmonization of development cooperation in communities. •
•
Tanzania’s sector wide approach to health care has, no doubt, achieved significant improvements in health outcomes that are unparalleled in other countries – between 1990 and 2004, annual death rates in children under five in Tanzania fell by 40 percent and between 2000 and 2004 alone, by 24 per cent. An April 2008 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet showed that, if its trend of improved child survival is sustained, Tanzania could reach the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) — a reduction of mortality in children under five by two-thirds — during the period between 1990 and 2015.
•
Local governments can rely on the Aid Effectiveness principles as a basis to demand and develop a clear division of tasks at the local level that reflects the complementarities between the different development actors (States, cooperation agencies, NGOs etc.); Local governments of the South should promote action plans in their communities that are based on priorities defined in participatory planning processes, to favour coordination and complementarity of action of different development actors; Decentralized cooperation actors should coordinate their interventions to enhance the efficiency of their cooperation, avoiding duplication, overlap and fragmentation of development aid.
Box 6 – Coordination by the UCLG CIB Working Group At the global level, through the UCLG Capacity and Institution Building (CIB) Working Group, member LGAs work to enhance program coherence and coordination, promote collaboration on policy analysis, share practical knowledge and lessons learned from the collective experience of northern and southern LGAs, and reduce administrative burden on local partners. Wherever feasible, they implement coordinated diagnostic assessments, planning,
Currently, only a handful of countries request that donors give funds to their general budget rather than to specific projects, and only 2% of donor money directed to maternal and child health is allocated this way. Source: case study 2
22